Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
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Not-Quite-Edict One: Only interact with living humans if you are assigned to ferry them.
Sunny Day picks up her flowers and walks away.
I slip into the cloak of the veil where I should have stayed.
My human-like heart is pounding, and my feet are still rooted to the sidewalk.
Her hips sway beneath the silky fabric of her dress as she walks away, and the sunlight on her pale red hair turns it golden.
I shouldn’t have been watching her at all.
But the moment I saw her exquisite beauty framed by the white flowers she carried and the green trees beyond, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Then the church bell sounded so much like a summons, and she fell.
Her bright red blood was outside of her body, and I didn’t think, I just…
My chest is buzzing, and I feel faint. I appeared to a human who wasn’t dying, to a soul who wasn’t assigned to me.
At least, not yet. I had fully broken a Not-Quite-Edict.
I had touched the shockingly soft, warm flesh of a human soul lit with a human life.
I can’t get enough air in, and I didn’t think I even needed air to survive.
Her eyes were the green of sea foam, her skin pink and speckled with brown dots, her hair like the first luminous orange of an Earthen sunset.
I’ve had this almost-human body for a few decades and I thought I knew it well.
But new sensations are fluttering in my belly and aching in my groin.
I press my hand over my hammering heart, which had only ever beat slowly and steadily before.
What had Sunny Day done to me?
She walks back out from a different exit than she entered and past me, her eyes scanning around the trees and parking lot and straight through where I hide in the veil.
She walks even with me and I feel the primal heat of her body.
My hand raises on its own toward her soft skin.
The breeze carries her sweet scent to me as she passes—like the little red berries humans love…
strawberries?—and all my symptoms increase.
She opens a door on her vehicle. I don’t like that she drives one of those.
They’re too dangerous for such a lovely human.
I step into the middle of the sidewalk. Should I follow her as she leaves and warn her?
I don’t want her exquisite life to extinguish too soon, and I cannot never see her again.
But it doesn’t seem right to follow her or speak to her again.
She walks toward me again with more flowers, and I freeze on the sidewalk, my chest throbbing so that I’m almost dizzy. As she comes closer and closer, she gazes all around, and a smile lights her face. What is she thinking of?
I am mesmerized and cannot move away in time. She steps through me, and the golden warmth of her body and soul living together infuse my form and soul with longing. I fall to my knees as she keeps walking. The high vibrations of the roses she carries shiver through me like delicious music.
I’m transformed. I cannot take my eyes off the vehicle for fear Sunny Day will leave, and I will never see her again. She comes out again, climbs into her bright blue vehicle. Its beast roars to life and it moves toward the parking lot’s exit. I jump to my feet but cannot make myself follow her.
Sunny Day is not for me. I am here for Chantelle and her family, not for frivolous daydreams and rioting almost-human bodies. I stand and watch her vehicle until it turns a corner and away.
My thoughts chase behind her, but I scratch at an itch at my belly and go into the church.
As I predicted, the humans’ grief pours over me like a wave at ???∞?’s beach, threatening to sink me under its weight.
Human emotions are wilder and stronger than almost anything in the universe.
But the memory of Sunny Day’s smile ineffably buoys me.
Chantelle’s father embraces someone near the decorated box where Chantelle’s past form lies.
His grief is sharp as a sword, like a few others in the room, but most of the people here have a duller grief that aches and weighs in my chest.
I look down at my…small gift, as she called it.
A blue-purple flower tied with ribbon to fragrant, pointy leaves and two kinds of yellow flowers.
I’ve never been given a flower before, and I’m mesmerized.
I carefully rub the soft, deep blue-purple petals between my fingers, run my fingertips across the spiky bits in the middle, which are surprisingly soft.
The grief in the room lessens for me, as if the memory of Sunny Day has made something heavy, lighter.
An itch again at my stomach. Maybe something fell in my shirt when I stopped to help Sunny Day. I look down past her gift. The thinnest golden cord of energy is emitting from my belly.
All sound, all vision, all awareness shrinks to this focal point.
An etheric cord leaves my belly and fades into the distance.
My heart skips a beat as I lay my hand against the cord and feel.
Sunny Day’s bright being blossoms behind my closed eyes, the delicious aching that had thrummed through her body when I knelt before her surged into me again through the cord, waking up my human-like form with desire I’ve never felt before today.
I open my eyes and follow the bright line of the cord for as long as I can see it, but I don’t need anyone to tell me where it leads.
Or rather, to whom.
A chime sounds, and I step through the veil toward my next assignment quickly, as I always do.
I comfort the dying man, he takes my hand, and I commute him across the veil to rejoin his wife and sister.
I concentrate on each step, doing my duty to its fullest and most empathetic, trying to put Sunny Day from my mind, but the cord growing brighter from my belly quivers like a plucked harp string. And it will not be ignored.